Never Let Me Go
by LooseHeadRugger
Summary: Quinn, Rachel, and Finn grew up at Hailsham constantly being told that they were special, that they were destined to be great, that they were going to change lives one day… even if it was at the expense of their own. Based on the book Never Let Me Go.
1. Prologue

**So I keep popping up with random new stories even though I have two others I'm currently working on but I keep getting ideas in my head so bare with me here, this one will be a short one probably 4 or 5 chapters. So this is a Faberry story based off of the book and the movie Never Let Me Go (although more on the movie because it's much easier to sit and take notes on a movie than it is a book) and if you haven't seen/read it yet, there will be spoilers ahead so I recommend doing one or the other beforehand. The main characters will be Quinn, Rachel, and Finn but I might incorporate some of the other characters as minor roles if it doesn't seem to cheesy and awkward. So Hope you enjoy!**

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****Chapter 1**** – Prologue**

**Spring 2024**

In the eighteen years passing beyond their creation; a laboratory procedure that had set their destiny for them before so much as a single cell was created, at the mark by which they were considered fully mature and ready to begin the final process leading to their ultimate completion, the children of Hailsham had learned to become so adapted to living a sheltered existence, sculpted amidst its finest detail, that by the time they finally did enter the closest thing to a true existence that any of them would experience in their short, predetermined lives and felt true, unadulterated pain for the first time, the majority of them couldn't even fully process what it was that was happening to them.

Sure, growing up at Hailsham there had been love, pain, jealousy, fear, overwhelming joy… but developing around nothing beyond regulations and boundaries, the dwellings of outside emotions was saved for just that; the outside.

But the children of Hailsham never did get the opportunity to learn much about the outside… to them, the world might as well have both started and ended at the boundary fences surrounding the vast property of their school… and for a lot of them, it actually did.

But even when she had been young, even when she had still found herself bound to the chains of Hailsham, even when she had still naively believed that she would grow up one day to change the world, living in such a mundane existence never had seemed to satisfy Quinn F.'s need, her desire to be something bigger…

It wasn't so long ago now that Quinn used to find herself looking forwards, viewing life in terms of the future and never dwelling on the past. But as time gradually progressed and the time ahead actually began to become shorter than the time behind, she'd performed a rapid and complete 180… and eventually, there came a day where she'd learned only to live strictly in terms of the past.

That had been the day that Quinn, like so many before her, had experienced her true, unadulterated pain for the first time… and, as had those who had come before her and those that will come after, she couldn't even begin to comprehend what was happening around her.

Quinn didn't have an earliest memory of Finn H. who had been her best friend growing up… To Quinn, Finn seemed to just always just sort of… well, be there. Without a definitive time in which he had come to enter her life and managed to change it, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, Quinn could never quite pinpoint the exact moment in which the two had decided to become best friends.

But with Rachel, things had been different.

At Hailsham everybody already knew that Rachel B. was different from everybody else mainly because unlike all of their other peers and classmates, the memory of the first time they had ever met Rachel B. stuck so strongly out in the backs of all of their minds that they all would have sworn to you that the memory was permanently etched into a stone wall somewhere deep within the confines of their brains.

Despite the fact that they had been so young at the time of their initial meeting, they could still remember the distinct details of Rachel's personality; so full of talent, so raw with emotion that for a long time, rumors would circulate across the school grounds that that Rachel B. girl had been placed here by pure accident, that she wasn't like the rest of them, that she had somehow been created to be beyond what the rest of them could ever even imagine.

But Quinn's earliest memory of Rachel wasn't a physical one… in fact, as compared to the meaning that it had always held deep inside of Quinn's heart her earliest memory of Rachel actually wasn't that powerful at all…

With fuzzy details and a vague outline, Quinn could almost picture the outside corridor surrounding the garden in the front of the Hailsham grounds… It had happened during recess, and while the rest of the students were engaging in flower picking or a friendly game of soccer, Rachel had been doing something different, something strange… something that the children of Hailsham didn't tend to do very often…

She was singing.

And despite being unable to picture the image of this vague memory in its entirety, Quinn could still remember every note, every melody of that song that had been hummed by the five year old Rachel B. on a warm September day at the beginning of their first year at Hailsham… It had been a soft tune, sung in a key that remained alarmingly perfect despite the fact that it had been sung by a five year old child who was supposed to be designed to remain positively soulless…

It still made the hairs on the back of Quinn's neck stand up straight; it still sent a shiver down the entirety of the length of her spine.

It was what brought her back here today… More than twenty years beyond her earliest memory of Rachel B., that had ultimately been what connected the two back together.

Hell, it was what brought them all back here eventually…

The sterility of the operating room was so strong that Quinn could practically taste the antiseptic seeping through a thick wall of cement tile and an observation window made entirely from polycarbonate glass. The empty room in front of her was so typical, so normal that even Quinn had almost forgotten what was scheduled to occur inside of it mere moments from now… and as if on cue the door opened and there she was…

Quinn felt herself press her body subconsciously forwards against the clear glass, but as much as she urged it to sink right through the thick material, she knew that it never would, so instead, she was left to the vices of the next best thing; she closed her eyes, she pressed her cool forehead and her warm palm upwards against the glass, and she imagined her hand entwined amidst Rachel's, and as they shifted Rachel from the old gurney onto the cool metal slab of the operating table, Quinn almost reached the point in which she could actually feel it.

Harsh pink scars littered the younger girl's torso; a tell-tale sign of the two donations that Rachel had already cleared from with great success despite the initial idea that she would be one of those donors too weak to ever reach her third… Her muscles were relaxed, her face was set, and as Quinn slowly opened her eyes and gazed inward towards the now-crowded operating theater, full of surgeons preparing to cut the only person that had ever truly showed her what it meant to love and to be loved open and take her apart, their stares met, and Rachel did something that donors in her current position very rarely did… she smiled.

And with her peace of mind set, prepared to carry her beyond the pains and pressures of her third donation, Rachel forced her eyes away from Quinn, she looked directly upwards towards the ceiling, and she allowed the medications currently seeping through her pre-designed veins to take control.

And suddenly, Quinn wished that she would have been granted the opportunity to look into those eyes just a little bit longer, she wished that she could have known the life they would have lived together had they just been together from the very beginning, she wished the world could have just been fair in so that they might have been in love for the rest of time and beyond…

Because to Quinn, even a lifetime with Rachel would have been too short… of course time wasn't on their side, it never had been… If there was one lesson that Quinn had learned in her time spent at Hailsham it was that… because there was never a future in store for Quinn, or for Rachel, or in fact, any of the children of Hailsham…

There never has been, and there never will be.


	2. Hailsham

**So I was going to make this all one chapter but it was starting to get pretty long so I decided to separate it into two parts. Anyway, this chapter is basically just to lay down the scene and the next one will be about describing certain things that are going on so once again, thank you so much for reading it means everything you guys are all awesome!**

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**Chapter 2****: Hailsham (Part I)**

She had gone through the majority of her life plagued by the belief that if it weren't for all of these medical breakthroughs, the ones that had been perfected in the late 80s that made things like heart disease and cancer and epilepsy things of the past, the ones that had doubled the life expectancy within five years, the ones that had lead to these banks of originals and donors by which she had come from, well then she never would have existed to begin with so everything that they were doing to her was completely justified…

These people had put her here; they had every right to take her away too.

But that had been a belief that was much more maintainable when she'd been confined behind the walls of Hailsham, confined to a constant surrounding of children being raised exactly as she was, believing exactly what she did, destined to become exactly what she would…

Of course, thinking back on it now, life at Hailsham had been pretty good actually… The naivety of childhood, the infiniteness of invincibility… it was a life that Quinn would give anything to go back to now that it was gone… and if she knew that returning to the days of Hailsham would have saved Finn's life, or Rachel's, or any of the other children who have long since completed really… well then she would have found a way to do it a long time ago.

But as she was starting to learn for herself, extending the pathway by which you complete your course of destiny won't change it. Whether she liked it or not, this was how she was created, this was what she was designed to do, and besides, as Quinn already knew, no amount of science would ever be able to bring her back to her simpler days… the ones that she had spent at Hailsham.

Her memories of Hailsham were limited… Despite constantly trying, Quinn could never remember much of her childhood as it had existed before her entrance into grade 4… It had been the year she'd fallen in love for the very first time, it was the year that she realized that she wasn't like any of the other kids that she grew up with… but then again, neither was Rachel.

It wasn't more than ten years ago since she'd last stepped foot onto the vast grounds of Hailsham's schoolyard, but to her it felt like a lifetime ago… But still, if she closed her eyes and truly tried to picture it, Quinn could still see the outline of the large 19th century brick building, she could still feel the constantly overgrown grass of the playground weave between her bare toes, she could still hear the old organ in the auditorium playing alongside the vast number of children singing in unison, the words of the school song that she still had memorized.

_When we are scattered afar and asunder parted from those who are singing today,_

She was ten years old the first time her grade four guardian caught her trying out a cigarette that she had found abandoned along the front path… Assuming that it had been dropped by one of the many groundskeepers of Hailsham, she had picked it up and automatically figured… why not? But of course with no lighter and barely so much as a prerequisite knowledge that a cigarette even required lighting in order to be useful, she hadn't exactly gotten very far at the time that she'd gotten caught.

_When we look back and forgetfully wonder what we were like in our learning and play._

She can still remember how terrified she'd felt sitting outside of the office of her headmistress… Miss Emily after all, was a pressing lady, a force to be reckoned with… But intimidating and fearful at first sight, she truly was a warm-hearted, gentle individual when it came down it… at least Quinn used to think so because she remembered that Miss Emily used to always remind her of just how special she was.

_Oh the great days from great distance enchanted, days of fresh air in the rain and the son._

Of course, all of the students at Hailsham were special… it was a fact that they were reminded of every morning; eight o'clock on weekdays, ten o'clock on weekends, when every single student, teacher, and staff member of Hailsham would crowd into the stuffy, always overly hot auditorium, smothered by their generic gray uniforms made out of itchy wool, listening with rapt attention to the daily morning announcements as they were made by the headmistress.

_How we rejoice as we struggled and panted – Echoes of dreamland, Hailsham lives on._

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**Spring 2004**

During recess at Hailsham, you were almost guaranteed to find anybody that you wanted to as long as you knew exactly where to look. The boys were usually on the fields playing either soccer, or football… either that or they were running around terrorizing all of the girls because they were all too young to realize that this sort of thing was just a secret indication that they liked them no matter how many times they said they didn't… And the girls… well, the girls were usually on the sidelines, watching as the boys ran around the fields playing either soccer or football… either that or they were putting up with all of the relentless teasing from the boys because they were all mature enough to know exactly what it meant.

Yes at first glance, the children of Hailsham appeared to be just as normal as any other child you might wander across playing in the schoolyard during recess… of course, not even they realized quite yet that they weren't normal… that they were in fact, much beyond that.

It had been a warm spring day in late June; Quinn had been ten, nearly eleven years old at the time. She was sitting upright against the fence post that designated the west-side boundaries of the Hailsham grounds with Finn, picking flowers and weeds from the grass while the rest of her grade had been picking teams for soccer when it happened.

She'd been staring at her fellow grade four's for several minutes, watching as they organized themselves into a straight line, stepping out one by one in order to walk towards their designated soccer teams… but amidst the large line of her various classmates and friends, her eyes only caught one of them…

Rachel was never the best of athletes and as a result, she was never one to be picked first for soccer… or second, or even anything closer than last… but still, despite her seeming lack of skill on her childhood playing field, an unusual feeling swept through Quinn's insides at the time… just like it always did when she looked over at Rachel.

She shuddered involuntarily despite herself, trying to identify this strange feeling… the feeling that she knew all of the other girls talked about when they discussed how they felt about boys, and the feelings that she knew all of the boys talked about when they discussed how they felt about girls… but it was never the feelings that any of the boys talked about when they discussed how they felt about other boys or that any of the girls talked about when they discussed how they felt about other girls… and that was what always confused Quinn the most.

And Quinn didn't like that feeling of bewildered unknowing, so she tended not to linger… instead, she turned back to the small necklace she had been making, the one Rachel taught her how to create using the dandelions they always picked together at lunchtime, twining the stems together with her tiny fingers, sporadically sneaking glances up towards Rachel as she fidgeted and shuffled nervously amidst the line of children dissipating before her very eyes although she continued to remain firmly affixed in the exact same spot…

It was something as simple as a flash of wind that ultimately bought Quinn's attention back onto herself… the breeze as it swept underneath the small flower necklace entwined between her fingers and lifted it straight out of her small palm, carrying it across its current and straight over the border of Hailsham's surrounding fence, forever lost amidst the uncharted grounds beyond it.

For several seconds Quinn could only stare at her hard-worked creation as it rested permanently amidst its new home… just an arm's length out of reach… but of course, an arm's length too far for Quinn to ever know…

"What do you think happens to people out there Finn?" Quinn asked her friend airily, her eyes still carefully lingering on the necklace lying beyond within the grass.

"You know Quinn…" Finn replied to her question, fidgeting with his fingers uncomfortably as the reminder of just what happens to you should you venture beyond Hailsham's property line lingering in an awkward suspension hanging directly above both of their heads… Because he was right, Quinn knew all of the stories, and she knew them well, just as all the rest of the students at Hailsham had…

There had only been two children to ever grow daring enough to test the limits of the borders of the Hailsham grounds… and both of those children had ended up lost, only to be found days later, brutally murdered, mangled in the most horrible ways that you could ever possibly imagine… The stories were true; everybody knew that they were; every single one of them… and they knew this because they could never possibly imagine a human being ever having the capacity to simply make up stories as horrible as those.

But like everything else at Hailsham, the details were fuzzy and the desire was indescribable … and like most of the things that Quinn had ever been told, she had a strange desire to learn even more…

"I know what they say Finn," Quinn reiterated her initial point, emphasizing her original question as to truly force Finn to actually think about it so that he would maybe answer her truthfully for a change, "But what do you think _happens_… What do you think is out there?"

For a long time, Finn could only stare at her; his expression contorted into one of utter horror as he looked deeply towards Quinn as if he had never seen her before, as if he thought her crazy for so much as allowing such an idea to enter her mind… But she was spared the actual answer, distracted by the sounds of a continuous series of shouts that had originated from just in front of them; a loud, shrill noise that had suddenly reminded Quinn that Rachel had still been standing mere feet away this entire time; a fact that she had surprisingly forgotten about in these past seconds, too enthralled by the idea of what awaited them beyond that mysterious border to concentrate on multi-tasking.

It was the sound of Rachel's screaming that brought her back to the thinnest of her layers of reality, forcing her to glance back towards Rachel once again, but this time alongside the lingering eyes of the rest of the students at Hailsham, desperate to catch a fleeting look of Rachel B.'s latest tantrum.

The girl was standing alone in the same exact spot as she had been before, watching as the rest of the children destined to begin their game of soccer began walking towards their respective field, all the while leaving Rachel behind.

"It's her own fault you know." Finn commented, nodding his head towards Rachel, his eyes never leaving her form as she jumped, flailed, and shouted dramatically as the other students continued to float further and further away from her, falling apparently deaf to her calls as she beckoned them back.

"Mhm," Quinn responded simply, unable to express anything more because she felt differently from her best friend, very differently… She had been captured by Rachel's tantric, yet graceful motions… it had been the picturesque action of a child just striving for a little bit of extra attention, because Rachel always wanted a little bit of extra attention that was for certain, but Quinn didn't know why she had to try so hard… because Rachel B. had Quinn's attention all of the time, no matter how aware she was it or not.

"She should just learn to keep her cool… than all of the other kids would leave her alone… Hey, where are you going?" Finn paused in his belittling of Rachel only when Quinn had stood from her position against the fence, her eyes glued in front of her, her ears closed to Finn's inquiries as her feet moved her forwards, closer and closer towards the still-screaming Rachel with every step.

She approached quickly, the distinction of Rachel's wordless, incoherent screaming echoing louder between her ears the closer she got until she was but an arm's reach, extending a tentative hand out towards Rachel's back, which was turned towards Quinn, moving to offer her a touch which was supposed to be of comfort.

"You shouldn't let them get to you, you know," Quinn whispered to the girl, lowering her slim fingers down against Rachel's shoulder where they molded into the bone like a puzzle piece.

She jumped in response to the sudden awareness of Quinn's presence, whipping around with her extended bony arm flailing alongside of her so that the open back of her hand collided painfully with the side of Quinn's face resulting in a resounding crack that made the both of them pause.

And for the first time in several minutes, Quinn could see comprehension beyond her own fit forming deeply around Rachel's eyes as she stared into Quinn's for several silent seconds; Rachel's expression of surprise colliding with Quinn's distinct look of hurt as she gently rubbed at the forming bruise alongside her jaw line.

Their eyes formed a deep link; shock slowly contorting within both of their features for the lingering seconds that they remained connected before Rachel simply turned away without a single word exchanged and walked slowly off the field without a single other word.

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Quinn would never have recognized this idea as it was at the time, but years later she would come to the distinct realization that the day that she had approached Rachel amidst a tantrum for the first time was the first day of many more to come in which she would find herself self-assigning tasks of immense challenge, the day that she had began forcing herself out of the comforts of her comfort zone for reasons that had been unknown even to her.

Quinn knew that had it been an option, Rachel would have avoided her for the rest of the day following their incident on the pavilion; but Hailsham had been a small school to begin with, and besides, all of the grade fours had class together all day anyway, so for Rachel and Quinn, avoidance wasn't an option.

But still, it wasn't until dinner time until the two spoke again… Quinn had been carrying her tray steadily towards her regular cafeteria table where the rest of the girls of her grade sat to eat every meal in the far right hand corner of the large room when she'd noticed Rachel sitting alone within a long, but otherwise abandoned table besides the meal queue with one hand burying itself deep into the flesh of her face, and the other twirling her fork aimlessly around the untouched vegetables on her plate.

"Aren't you sitting with the other girls tonight?" Rachel barely looked up as she spoke to Quinn, responding to the girl's motions as she sat at the table bench directly across from her.

"Not tonight," Quinn told her, sinking lower into the wooden chair in an effort to prove herself to Rachel, "Tonight I'm going to sit with you… I mean… if that's alright…"

She nodded her head simply in response to Quinn's hesitation but offered to additional words; instead she slowly tilted her chin upwards, careful to avoid locking her eyes with Quinn's until the very last moment when it became impossible not to…

"I wanted to apologize," Rachel told her quietly, "I mean… for before, you know? I mean… I would never hit anybody on purpose… especially not you."

Those familiar shuddering butterflies once again entered into Quinn's stomach like a hurricane, just as they did every time Rachel spoke to her… especially when she complimented her as she had… She could feel her hands instantly begin shaking, her best efforts to control the movement no match for the adrenaline currently pouring through her veins.

"You didn't mean it Rachel; it was an accident, that's all." Quinn whispered softly, using the strength of every muscle she had in her arm to will the limb forward, allowing her to lower her hand over Rachel's own and feeling her breath hitch upwards inside of her throat when she felt the girl return the motion, entwining her fingers further against Quinn's own.

"Well you don't have to worry about that anymore," Rachel nodded her head confidently, "I'm not gonna do that every again… I mean, get angry like that again… I um… I talked to Ms. Lucy about it, you know, the new guardian and she told me that I didn't need to get mad… at least not like that… She told me that the kids, well they just liked to make fun of me because I was different, because I was special… she told me that it was just because I was more creative than the other kids."

"Like with your singing?" Quinn asked but deep down in her heart of hearts she couldn't but think that she had always known that Rachel was special, that she was more creative… after all, it wasn't exactly a mystery that Rachel, at such a young age had already possessed a voice like that of all of those women she always heard on the cassette tapes that the teachers liked to give to them in all of their culture classes where they went to learn what life on the outside world that they would never experience was like.

"I don't know, I guess." Rachel shrugged her shoulders; she could never be certain that that was what her teachers meant when they'd called her creative… because at Hailsham, creativity was always a force to be reckoned with; a mysterious allure; special, lingering, unsure… They knew that all of the teachers, the headmistress, and the owner of the school always enjoyed tokens of the children's creative expressions, that they kept the best drawings, the most well composed poems… the thing was, it was never quite clear why.

"Maybe it's not my singing," Rachel continued, thinking aloud as she spoke, "Maybe she meant my drawings… you know, the ones for the Gallery and all of that… I mean, why else would they collect only certain kids' drawings for the gallery if it didn't mean that those kids were special?"

"Well she must have meant something important when she said it." Quinn spoke her confidence towards Rachel, subconsciously entangling her fingers even tighter between Rachel's as she did so, "Because I think that being creative is the most special thing that you can have… and maybe… well maybe that's why you're so special to me."

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For the next several weeks that followed the incident outside on the playing field, Rachel and Quinn couldn't help but find themselves growing closer.

A resounding tidal shift in a time period where Quinn began to actually see Rachel in her true light; a side that was rarely shown under her thick skin, but a side, Quinn learned, was equally as profound, equally as expressive as her other…

Feeling herself as a guest inside of the inner workings of Rachel's complex brain, as having simply been granted a summons within her very mind, Quinn hadn't taken the invitation lightly; instead, she had analyzed the conditions, observed the displays, and criticized to no end, that aching sense of pain that she felt alongside Rachel every time she found the girl being tormented by the other students of Hailsham, the pang of anger that irradiated down to her very bones, expressed very physically, very loudly through the scenes that Rachel continued to cause despite all of the guardians' constant reminders that she was only teased because she was special…

The entire school had already been convinced of the idea that Rachel was nothing more than a complete whack job, so much so that her own attitude nearly overshadowed in its completion, even the worst of the bullying enacted upon her… so they all agreed, it mustn't be the fault of the bullies or the people who allowed it to happen, but that of Rachel herself who brought it on, who enticed it with her own attitude, and therefore, nothing should be done about it.

Quinn always hated it when people used to tell her this, but she had the faintest idea that that was because she used to be one of those people, and she hated herself for it because that had been a different time, a different chapter in her life; the one that had occurred before she truly knew Rachel, the one that had occurred before she actually learned exactly what it meant to really be able to see…

There had been an incident, only a few days after the interaction between Rachel and Quinn on the soccer field; an incident in which Reggie F., a boy in their grade, had put a worm in Rachel's desk before the start of class so that in a fit of both horror and rage, Rachel had thrown the entirety of the small table clear across the room with a surprise strength that nobody had previously expected from her… After that desk had landed, hitting Reggie in the side of the head and damn near fracturing his skull in the process, it was several days before Quinn finally saw Rachel again, and even when she did, she never wanted to talk about what happened…

And then there was that time, weeks later, that Rachel had been picked last for baseball in gym class and she'd attacked Charlotte V. in her fit of rage, managing to scratch the girl's face up pretty good with her long fingernails too before Mr. Randall, the school's gym teacher managed to pull her off the other girl and restrain her.

It was the placing of cockroaches in Rachel's oatmeal at breakfast, or the scrubbing of the toilet with her toothbrush, and the hiding of all of her most valued possessions in the floor boards along the attic that steered Quinn towards Rachel every time, because Quinn always remembered thinking that as it got worse, as it progressed to an intolerable level, that as long as Rachel had somebody to support her, maybe somebody else would finally start to speak out against it, that maybe it would stop… But it never did; and finally, Quinn had gotten to the point where she was tired of waiting, and had ultimately decided to speak out for herself.

The first time that she mentioned it her, Finn, and a few of the other children in their class were gathered outside in the pavilion.

The pavilion was a hard place to come by, a hard place to mark any significant territory in during the hours of free period because every student of Hailsham wanted the opportunity to claim it as their own. For the older kids, it was the ideal spot to hang out, and for the younger kids, it was a perfect ground to run about and kick the ball around on… Acquiring space on the pavilion usually required a strong minded type of person inside of your own individual group in order to take it, and although Quinn had never quite been the commanding type herself, it was usually Finn that had gotten them a space there, and it was usually Finn who had done it often.

There was a type of conversation that could only happen at the pavilion, the only place where you could discuss absolutely anything that you wanted to; your deepest of desires, your most desperate of fears… Yes, the pavilion and all of the activities that it engaged in was certainly something to be desired, which was why it was the one place that Quinn felt comfortable bringing up Rachel knowing that it would elicit too many suspicions…

"I don't think that it's very fair what everybody's been doing to Rachel lately." She presented her argument simply, the last of her words hanging off of her mouth alongside an awkward silence that lingered throughout the warm spring air… All eyes had been on Quinn since before she so much as ended her sentence, but slowly, the stares began turning to Finn, just as they always did in moments like this, in moments that required diffusion of awkward tension, moments that Finn seemed to positively specialize in.

"I think you're right."

"You do?" Quinn wasn't going to pretend as if she hadn't been surprised by his response, after all, Quinn had previously assumed Finn to be just like the rest of Hailsham in thinking that the entirety of Rachel's attitude problems had been brought on by herself, even though Quinn knew all along that it was in fact something much deeper than that.

"Of course I do, it's not right what they do to her but still, I think that if she wants it all to stop she has to start by changing her own attitude…" Quinn couldn't help but feel her heart sink in response to her friend's words… they were after all, the exact same words that Quinn had been repeating over and over again to Rachel for weeks now…

She couldn't help but wonder if Finn had the same ideas about Rachel as she had, well did that mean that he felt the same butterflies dancing inside of his stomach every time she looked at him? Did it mean that he still felt that confusing sense of yearning towards the girl? Did it mean that Finn spent just as much time thinking about Rachel as Quinn did?"

"Change… what do you mean change?"

"Just change, that's all…"

Even years after their little exchange in the center of the pavilion, long after Finn and Rachel had officially began dating, and long after they had stopped again with Quinn already so far out of the way it would be nearly a decade before she saw either one of them again, she could remember seeing that spark behind Finn's eyes as he spoke of Rachel, she could remember that pang of jealousy that she didn't understand why she was feeling, and she remembered eyeing Finn for the rest of break with her eyes narrowed and her expression hostile…

And just as Finn had looked down and noticed Quinn's glare, making the move to ask her what it had been all about, his eyes were inadvertently ripped away from her; the bellowing howls being emitted from a child somewhere behind them calling to all of their attentions as the eyes of every student at Hailsham turned to watch a large group of grade four students walking onto the soccer pitch, once again leaving Rachel isolated and enraged behind them.


End file.
